For Better and for Worse, Long Before the Wedding

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The bride and groom in church with the groom’s father, Neal; daughter, Liv; and son, Noah.CreditCreditTina Fineberg for The New York Times

By J. Gordon Julien

Oct. 25, 2013

Jay Nickerson spent 20 years listening to a friend, the comedian and actress Suzanne Whang, talk about her relationships, silently thinking that she could do so much better than this guy, whoever the guy happened to be at the time. During those conversations, Mr. Nickerson, an actor turned special-education teacher, kept pushing away the nagging feeling that maybe he was the right guy.

They had met in 1993 when they were in the cast of “My Sister Eileen” at the West End Theater, on the second floor of the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on West 86th Street. “Every man in the cast, regardless of sexual orientation, was in love with her,” said Mr. Nickerson, now 59. “She was very smart, funny, friendly and beautiful.”

She was also hard to miss in her costume, silken black hair cascading down a dress of sunshine yellow with black polka dots. Ms. Whang, whose surname is pronounced “Wong,” described him as a leading man from Turner Classic Movies: a combination of Gregory Peck and Cary Grant.

Back then, Mr. Nickerson, who had grown up in Duluth, Minn., and graduated from the University of Minnesota, was married, and Ms. Whang had a steady boyfriend. They became fast friends, though, discovering a shared love of 1940s films, storytelling and laughter.

In 2007, Mr. Nickerson, who had taught acting at Brooklyn College and public speaking at Fordham, joined the New York City Teaching Fellows program in exchange for a subsidy to pursue a second master’s degree, this time in special education. (His first was in fine arts.) He now teaches at a public school in Brooklyn.

After degrees in psychology from Yale and Brown, Ms. Whang moved to Los Angeles in 1998 to pursue her show-business career. The daughter of a Navy engineer who moved the family often, she vowed to maintain friendships in her adulthood, and has friends from her 20s onward, including Mr. Nickerson, to show for it.

Boyfriends materialized and dissolved. She would introduce men to her mother, who would then whisper, “Who’s your next victim?”

She married, divorced and vowed to marry again “when pigs fly.” She became perhaps best known as the host of “House Hunters,” a reality show on HGTV. She also played Polly, a shamelessly inappropriate Korean spa owner, on the NBC series “Las Vegas.”

Her friends see her as unrelentingly positive and kind. “Suzanne is the kind of human being who will spoon-feed you when you are a mess,” said the actress Vanessa Marcil, who befriended Ms. Whang on the set of “Las Vegas.”

In the fall of 2006, Ms. Whang discovered that she had breast cancer. Typical of her approach, she told the doctor, “This will be great material for my act.”

The cancer diagnosis magnified her dual life as a traditional Korean woman who keeps troubles private and a modern American woman who speaks about them openly. She decided to keep quiet. She said she fell $500,000 into debt from treatments, including hip-replacement and back surgery, and still was not getting better.

Finally, broke and exhausted, she told her friends. They responded as she had hoped, setting up fund-raisers, feeding her and her dog and cleaning her house. “I found that everyone who I thought was my friend really was,” she said.

The cancer eventually progressed to Stage 4. “We were sleeping on cots in the hospital with her, and the doctor said she had six months to live,” Ms. Marcil said.

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The wedding incorporated references from the film “The In-Laws,” like drawing puppets on their hands.CreditTina Fineberg for The New York Times

True to her words to her physician, she used her health problems as material in her stand-up act. In private, she read spiritual books, began to meditate every day and radically altered her diet.

Ms. Whang, now 51, said the influence of her paternal grandfather, the Rev. Chai Kyung Whang, a prominent Presbyterian leader who established a church in Washington, helped her through the long crisis. He employed humor in his sermons. “People would say, ‘Church not funny.’ ” Ms. Whang says in an affected accent. “And my grandfather would say, ‘Need funny so people don’t fall asleep.’ ”

Five years after the diagnosis, and without a sure handle on what exactly had transpired in her body, the doctors said she was free of cancer.

Mr. Nickerson had troubles of his own. His marriage had fallen apart, and he, too, remarked that he would marry again when swine became airborne. Then in 2011 he received a diagnosis of congestive heart failure. “I think he had a broken heart,” said Sharon Seitz, a friend.

Despite his sadness, Ms. Whang was in the back of his mind. Yet he lacked the nerve to do anything about it. Then one night in September of last year, after a couple of glasses of wine, courage found him.

He wrote Ms. Whang an e-mail. It read: “I have been in love with you for nearly 20 years. I am hoping that when my youngest child (Liv) goes off to college in 2019, you and I can be together.” Embarrassed at his impetuousness, he used Google Translate to convert the message into French before sending it, figuring everything, even potentially embarrassing declarations of love, sounded better in French.

Five minutes later and much to his astonishment, Ms. Whang replied, “I have been in love with you for 20 years as well.” She didn’t mention her initial horror at the awful French. “On Liv’s graduation day in 2019,” she wrote, “meet me on top of the Empire State Building,” a reference to the 1957 movie “An Affair to Remember,” starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr.

Despite his initial suggestion, Mr. Nickerson did not believe he could wait that long. In January of this year, Ms. Whang called him, as she always had when she was in New York, suggesting they meet for lunch. He remembers when he saw her for the first time since the e-mail, at Le Pain Quotidien on the Upper West Side: “The music was playing, she was backlit in the window, and I made the long walk across the restaurant, able to notice openly that she’s gorgeous.”

Afterward, as they walked across West 86th Street in the cold to St. Paul and St. Andrew, Mr. Nickerson offered her his hand, and as Ms. Whang grasped it, she said, “this whoosh feeling goes through my body. That was it. I said to myself, ‘I really do love Jay.’ ”

They visited the theater on the second floor, then pushed through a previously unknown door to find themselves in the church’s sanctuary. In the front pew, they shared their first kiss.

Mr. Nickerson changed Ms. Whang’s contact name in his cellphone to “The One.” A few weeks later, on the way to visit her, he arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and found Ms. Whang standing at the bottom of an escalator, a boombox blaring Louis Armstrong singing “A Kiss to Build a Dream on” and holding a sign reading ‘The One.’ He proposed three days later.

They were married on Oct. 19 just one floor down from their first meeting and steps away from the site of their first kiss, in the sanctuary of St. Paul and St. Andrew. They had planned to elope (Ms. Whang is still $250,000 in debt), but family and friends chipped in for a celebration. Kelly Carlin, the daughter of George Carlin and a Universal Life minister, officiated. Ms. Marcil was a maid of honor, and the guests included the comedian Elayne Boosler and Ben Vereen.

Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck from “Roman Holiday” appeared on the wedding cake, and once again, Louis Armstrong’s voice rang above the crowd.

And pigs — confetti ones — flew. The couple themselves will be doing a lot of flying because, at least for now, they will continue to work on opposite coasts.

But possibly the biggest surprise, for Mr. Nickerson at least, was his bride’s dress. He took a sharp breath when she appeared in the church’s double doorway, grinning broadly and bright as a bumblebee in the polka-dot dress she had worn all those years before in “My Sister Eileen.”

Correction:Nov. 3, 2013

The Vows column last Sunday, about the marriage of Suzanne Whang and Jay Nickerson, misstated the timing of Mr. Nickerson’s proposal. He did so three days after he arrived in Los Angeles to visit her, not the same night. The column also omitted one of the maids of honor. Besides the actress Vanessa Marcil, Julie Koh, Ms. Whang’s sister, was also one.

Ms. Whang, who has spent a lifetime making up words, was not to be outdone when Mr. Nickerson coined “spousewaffles.” So in her vows she said, “When I’m with you, I feel blisscombobulated.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section ST, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: For Better and for Worse, Long Before the Wedding. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe